Impact propagation is one of the most frequently used and costly calculations required in systems management. For example, impact calculation and propagation typically require extensive computing resources and recursive traversal of large service model graphs that may have hundreds of thousands or even millions of nodes. A company's success today is integrally linked with its information technology (IT) services. Any disruptions or degradations in IT service can cause serious, even catastrophic, damage to business. That means that IT professionals are under considerable pressure to ensure that required IT service levels are delivered to users. Considering the complexity and dynamic nature of today's enterprise networks, it can be quite a challenge to achieve the high levels of service users require. Efficient impact propagation is important for properly managing the complexity and dynamic nature of today's enterprise systems so that the delivery of IT services can remain closely aligned with business requirements.
Because of the nature of system or service monitoring, it is likely that multiple impacting events (e.g. computer off-line or sub-network outage) will have to be processed at the same time or in close proximity to each other and furthermore, that these events often result in overlapping impact sets (the set of graph nodes impacted by a given event). As a result, traditional impact propagation techniques often require redundant graph traversal and impact calculations.
For example, a disk outage (i.e. alarm state) may affect the service level at a computer and may send that computer or a particular business function executing on that computer into WARNING or ALARM state. If the particular business function affected by the outage is accounts receivable, the service impact model would be updated to reflect the accounts receivable service is impacted in some way.